Danielle Citron

Professor Danielle Citron is the Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law. She teaches Civil Procedure, Information Privacy Law, Internet Speech, and LAWR I. She was voted the "Best Teacher of the Year" by the University of Maryland law school students in 2005.

Professor Citron’s scholarship focuses on information privacy law, cyber law, civil rights, and administrative law, with a focus on government’s reliance on information technologies. She is currently working on a book entitled Hate 3.0, which will be published by Harvard University Press. Her work has appeared in California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Boston University Law Review, George Washington Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, U.C. Davis Law Review, University of Chicago Legal Forum, and Denver University Law Review. She has been interviewed in dozens of media broadcasts and articles, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Forbes, Barron’s, Glamour, Associated Press, NPR, ABC, CNN, and Fox News.

Professor Citron is an Affiliate Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project and an Affiliate Fellow at the Stanford Center on Internet and Society. She serves on the advisory boards of privacy groups Future of Privacy, Without My Consent, and Teach Privacy. In late October 2011, she testified at the House of Commons before the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combatting Anti-Semitism Task Force on Internet Hate, of which she is a task force member.

During the past five years, she has given more than forty lectures and talks, including at the Department of Homeland Security, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, and the International Network Against Cyber Hate, as well as at numerous universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, University of Chicago, New York University, University of California at Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, University of Michigan, Fordham, Washington University, William & Mary, Denver, University of Colorado, and Emory.

In December 2009, the Denver University Law Review devoted a conference to her work on cyber harassment entitled Cyber Civil Rights: New Challenges to Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the Information Age. She has been a permanent blogger at Concurring Opinions since 2008.

With the help of law and changing norms, invidious discrimination has become less prevalent in arenas like schools, workplaces, hotels, and public transportation. Due to our social environments, anti-discrimination law is fairly easy to enforce. Because leaders usually can figure out those responsible for discriminatory conduct and ignore such behavior at their peril, bigotry raises a real risk of social sanction.

The Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), enacted in 1998 and finalized in 2000, requires commercial websites that target children under 13 or have actual knowledge that users are under 13 to ask for parental permission before collecting and using their information. Legislators hoped to protect children from predatory marketing, safety risks such as stalking or kidnapping, and other abuses related to the use of children’s private data. They also wanted more parental involvement in online data-collection practices and to encourage the development of technologies designed to give parents better tools to protect their kids’ online privacy. Although COPPA has succeeded in stopping egregious predatory data practices, it has fallen short of its core goals.

The U.K.’s freedom of information commissioner, Christopher Graham, recently told The Guardian that the WikiLeaks disclosures irreversibly altered the relationship between the state and public. As Graham sees it, the WikiLeaks incident makes clear that governments need to be more open and proactive, “publishing more stuff, because quite a lot of this is only exciting because we didn’t know it. . . WikiLeaks is part of the phenomenon of the online, empowered citizen . . . these are facts that aren’t going away. Government and authorities need to wise up to that.” If U.K. officials take Graham seriously (and I have no idea if they will), the public may see more of government. Whether that more in fact provides insights to empower citizens or simply gives the appearance of transparency is up for grabs.

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On Thursday, Sept. 6, Twitter permanently banned the right-wing provocateur Alex Jones and his conspiracy theorist website Infowars from its platform. This was something of the final blow to Jones’s online presence: Facebook, Apple and Youtube, among others, blocked Jones from using their services in early August. Cut off from Twitter as well, he is now severely limited in his ability to spread his conspiracy theories to a mainstream audience.

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"Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the University of Maryland and an expert on sexual privacy, also fears that consent could be coerced. But the real elephant in the room is that consent can change. “Consent apps do not capture any of the nuance in our interactions, and the changes in context can be dizzyingly fast,” she explained."

"Danielle Citron, a Twitter trust and safety partner and a professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, emphasized that if Harvey’s team is sometimes slow to address abuse, it’s only because they care so much about getting each case right. “They mean it when they say they care about speech that terrorizes and silences,” Citron said. “They really do have their users’ speech issues in mind in a way that’s very holistic.”"

"“It falls through the cracks because it’s all very betwixt and between,” Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and cyberspace expert, told Wired. “There are all sorts of First Amendment problems because it’s not their real body.”"

"And it's the very artifice involved in these videos that provides enormous legal cover for their creators. “It falls through the cracks because it’s all very betwixt and between,” says Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and the author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. “There are all sorts of First Amendment problems because it’s not their real body.” Since US privacy laws don’t apply, taking these videos down could be considered censorship—after all, this is “art” that redditors have crafted, even if it’s unseemly."

"“It’s not just the transaction,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor and privacy expert at the University of Maryland’s law school. “Powerful companies like Amazon don’t just have what you bought at the grocery store, but they’re also connected with and combined with nearly every aspect of your life,” including where people live and what they buy, read and watch."

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Sextortion—defined as blackmail (often by the threat of releasing sexually explicit images of the victim) carried out over a computer network, which forces victims to engage in some form of sexual activity online—is a new term for a new crime. The remote coercion of sex is a crime that was impossible until recently, but with the expansion of the Internet and proliferation of webcams, Sextortion is a growing form of exploitation. This remarkably understudied crime has affected thousands of people, almost entirely women and children.

University of Maryland Professor of Law and author of the book “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” Danielle Citron provides a systematic account of online harassment, and the personal, economic, professional and social costs to its victims and society. Citron tackles the increasingly prevalent but often trivialized issues of cyber stalking and cyber bullying, helps us understand them and maps a course for how we can address them.

Most Internet users are familiar with trolling—aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site’s comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling extent of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment.

Danielle Citron, the Lois K. Macht Research Professor and Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, will speak at Washington and Lee University on Tuesday, Sept. 16, at 5:30 p.m. in Northen Auditorium, Leyburn Library.

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Revenge porn is the non-consensual sharing of nude photos or videos. Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have revenge porn laws, according to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. And now Congress is considering a bill that would make revenge porn a federal crime. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Danielle Citron, an adviser on the bill and a law professor at the University of Maryland.

Social media is full of hurtful, racist and sometimes threatening speech. We take a look at the hyper-localized and anonymous culture of social media apps and digital bullying. Our guests: Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor and author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” and Issie Lapowsky, staff writer and tech trend reporter for Wired.